Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb?
…I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.
McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.
Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.
McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.
Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama’s most egregious association — with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.
There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?
And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.
The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.
HotAir Ed Morrisey on those that bent over backwards to support Obama (Motives Questionable):
Ken Adelman followed Christopher Buckley in engaging in little more than wishing on a birthday candle that Obama will become more conservative once he wins the election. Neither of them gave any evidence to believe that Obama would do so. Instead of treating this election as a choice between a centrist and a hard-Left ideologue, Adelman and Buckley indulged in spite over their distaste for McCain and wound up making fools of themselves.
Just in case you don’t make it to Ace’s:
I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings….Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the past year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?
He also takes a hatchet to the bogus charges laid against McCain this campaign about negative campaigning and temperament.
Not that anyone cares but while I dislike McCain enough to have been willing to vote for Hillary none of that translates into praise for Obama (as it has for a few notable ‘conservatives’). Obama is flat out dangerous. Since I live in a blue state that will go for Obama by at least 20% my vote doesn’t matter much but if enough conservatives in states like mine do the same and McCain can pull this out, maybe we can prevent Obama from getting the popular vote.
